“What?”
“Lady Brooke used to take me on long rides through the Euphrasian countryside, since I was not allowed to go anywhere on my own. Once, on a very cold day, I happened to spy a peasant couple. Each wore a thin, threadbare coat, and the woman shivered. The man took off his own coat and put it over her shoulders, even though this left him quite exposed. When the woman tried to stop him, he refused to take it back. He allowed the coat to fall to the ground, then placed it again upon her shoulders, until finally, she accepted it. I could see that he was trying to walk more rapidly to get to shelter, but he did not complain.”
“Wow. What did you do?”
“What I did was of no importance.”
“But you did something?”
“I suppose.” She glances down. “I made the driver stop the carriage and then asked Lady Brooke to give the couple our cloaks.”
“That was nice.”
“It was a small sacrifice for me. I had numerous cloaks at home. The man made a much greater sacrifice. I always wanted someone to sacrifice for me, as that man sacrificed for that woman, not because I was royalty, but simply because he lo…liked me. And you have.”
I shrug. “It’s not a sacrifice.”
And it’s true. It’s not. I wanted to go home early, wanted to try and get back together with Amber or, at least, be able to spend my summer sleeping and going to the beach instead of touring the Museum of Napoleon’s Nose Hair. Talia gave me a great excuse. If I’d known running away would work, I’d have tried it sooner.
The fact that my parents are completely riled is just an added bonus. Of course, they didn’t believe the truth about Talia.
“Jack, that’s not funny,” Mom said when I told her to prepare for visiting royalty.
“I’m not trying to be funny.”
That’s when Dad picked up the phone again.
“This has gone on long enough, Jack. Your mother’s all upset.”
“It’s true, Dad. She’s a princess. Why would I make that up?”
“I have no idea, but I don’t think—”
“Okay, Dad, you win. She’s some girl I picked up on the street. You never should have chosen a teen tour that went through Amsterdam’s red-light district.”
That pretty much ended the conversation.
Since then, I’ve decided it’s probably better if I don’t tell anyone that Talia’s a princess. I mean, who’d believe it?
Now they’re calling us to board the plane. I check to make sure that Talia has her boarding pass. She does, and she’s making a minute examination of the bar code. I nudge her. “It’s time to get on.”
Her eyes widen. “Onto the flying ship?”
“Onto the airplane. It’s called an airplane.”
She stands, then looks at all the people jockeying for space in line. “Will the ship…er, airplane, leave without all of them?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is it necessary to push and shove, as these people are doing, or can we wait patiently?”
I never thought about it. People just usually do push and shove to get on the plane, but then you just end up waiting on the runway, anyway. “We can wait,” I say. I would have thought she’d expect to go first, being a princess and all.
“Good. I do not like to shove.”
She takes her place at the end of the line, behind an elderly woman. “This is my first time on an airplane,” she tells her.
“Are you frightened, dear?”
“I am excited.”
And the woman looks excited for her.
We finally reach our seats. I give Talia the window, even though it means I’m stuck in the center.
“What is this?” Talia asks, holding up a plastic-wrapped package.
“Slippers. They’re to keep your feet warm.”
“How nice!” She starts to put them on. She’s got the cutest little feet. They look like they’ve never walked anywhere. Probably, she has servants who spread cream on them every day. She had a complete spaz about the blister she got walking. A moment later, she holds up another package. “What is this?”
“A mask. It’s to cover your eyes so you can sleep.”
Talia takes out the mask and examines it. “I have slept quite long enough already.” She tucks it into the seat-back pocket.
Hoo-boy. I remember last night at the hotel in Paris—a hotel with two queen-size beds with down comforters—Talia refused to sleep at all, instead running to the window over and over to look at the city lights. “Well, some people like to sleep,” I tell her, “so you’ll have to be quiet.”
She pouts for a full ten seconds before holding up something else.
“And these?”
“Earbuds, so you can listen to music or watch a movie.”
She purses her lips in this weird way she does. “What is a movie?”
“It’s like television.” She saw TV last night at the hotel. “You watch it to kill time on the plane.”
Please, please, let her at least watch a movie.
“Kill time?”
“You know, make it go faster.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Because it’s boring, sitting and doing nothing.”
“But you are doing nothing in the sky! How can that be boring?”
I shrug. “To most people, it is.”
“Try being asleep for three hundred years. Then you will know what boring is.”
I don’t say anything. I’m one of those people who wants to sleep.
“Everything is boring to you, isn’t it?” she says.
“That’s not true.”
Is it?
“Oh, no?” She tips up her feet to look at the airline slippers again. “Let me see…your parents sent you on a tour of Europe for…how long?”
“A month. I’ve been gone three weeks. But I don’t know what that’s got to do—”
“Three weeks at great expense. And during that time, you’ve visited how many countries?”
I count on my fingers—England, the Netherlands, France, Belgium…“I’m not sure. Five or six, maybe. It’s all a blur.”
“It’s all a blur,” she mimics, then laughs. “But in any case, you have viewed great masterworks, marvels of architecture, historical sights, and you have generally found it to be, on the whole, quite dull. Is that the case?”
When she puts it that way, it does sort of make me sound like a jerk. But she’s not getting the reason why I didn’t want to go.
“Look, you don’t understand. My parents, they just sent me to fulfill some fantasy they have about having a son who’s into that stuff. I never get any choice about what I do in the summer. After I get home, they’re going to want me to take an SAT course and get a job. It’s all about them.”
“I do not understand about not getting a choice as to how to live one’s life?”
I shrug. “Besides, the tour bus sort of sucked.”
“Ah. So, in order to get away from the sucking tour bus—”
“Sucky.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Sucky. You would say the bus was sucky. That’s what Americans would say.”
“Thank you. So, in order to get away from the sucky tour bus, you sneaked off, found a lost kingdom, entered a castle, kissed a princess—an incredibly beautiful princess who had been asleep for centuries due to a curse placed upon her at birth by an evil witch—caused a fracas, were thrown into a dungeon, escaped, and traveled cross-country with that same incredibly beautiful—”
“Not to mention modest.” I know I shouldn’t interrupt her or I’ll never get my earbuds in, but it’s tempting.
“Incredibly beautiful and intelligent princess. And still, you are quite bored, Jack, so bored that you cannot wait to put in your earbuds and be done with this conversation and this voyage.”
I fumble with the earbuds guiltily.
“So my question to you, Jack, is what is it that you do not find boring?”
Sh
e stops speaking and looks at me. I look at her. If anyone else, my friends from school, even Amber back when we were dating, had asked me such a question, I’d have blown them off, said something like, “partying” or “raising hell,” just to end the conversation. But with Talia, I know that won’t work. She won’t think it’s funny. She’ll think I’m stupid.
So instead of saying the first thing that comes to mind, I think about it, really think about the last time I wasn’t bored with something, the last time I was excited. She’s right. It’s been a while. My life has been this long series of hoops to jump through—school, activities Dad thinks would look good on my college apps, whatever, so I have to think back a long time.
“I apologize.” Talia interrupts my thoughts. “Do people not talk to each other in your time, then?”
“It’s not that. I was trying to think.”
“Obviously an activity of great difficulty for you.” She giggles.
Difficulty. That makes me remember something.
When I was a kid, I used to be in Boy Scouts. I quit the year Dad started talking about how good being an Eagle Scout would look on my college applications. But back when I was still in Scouts, one of the projects we did was this park.
“I like to plant stuff,” I say.
She looks surprised. “Plant? You mean, like a farmer?”
“More like a gardener. This one time in Boy Scouts, we did a project, a park in a bad neighborhood. It was all overgrown with weeds, and we pulled them out and planted flowers and trees. Most of the guys sort of fooled around, didn’t do much, but me…” I stopped, picturing it. “I really liked making it look better. I liked the work, putting my hands in the dirt or whatever.” I shrug.
“I do not think I have ever handled dirt. How does dirt feel?”
“Clean,” I say. “I mean, not clean like it’s been through the laundry, but…honest. And when we finally finished and saw how it looked, I felt really—I don’t know—proud.”
It was true. I’d gone back to look at that park after I got my driver’s license, even though I’d quit Scouts by then. I’d even pulled some weeds.
“I think I’d really like to be a gardener or maybe a landscaper.” I’ve never thought about it before, but I realize it’s true. When I think of what Dad wants me to do—wear a suit all day and sit at a desk—it just sort of makes me want to cry. “It would be cool to spend every day out in the sun, making things look beautiful.”
She smiles. “Then I think you should do so.”
I laugh. “Yeah, right. I can just see me telling my dad I want to plant stuff for a living. He thinks gardening’s for losers. He hires people to mow the lawn.”
Once, after the Boy Scout thing, I said I thought it would be cool to get a summer job at Disney World, working in their gardens. They have these beautiful gardens with topiaries. Dad said working outdoors was for illegal aliens.
“You should tell him that that is what you wish to do.”
“Yeah? How would that work with your parents?”
She shrugs, then smiles. “They cannot keep an eye on us all the time, can they?” Then she yawns. “My! Perhaps it is the power of suggestion, with the slippers and the sleep mask, but I am, indeed, rather tired.”
She places her sleep mask over her eyes and, in a moment, she is sawing wood, her head drifting sideways onto my shoulder. I know I should take the opportunity for a nap of my own, but instead I take out a sheet of paper and pencil and start drawing a plan for a garden. That was the problem with the tour: lots of buildings and paintings but no gardens. I draw one, a big one with roses and ivy.
A garden perfect enough for Talia’s castle in Euphrasia.
The plane starts to taxi. Talia jolts awake.
“Jack? Jack?” She peers out the window, then at me, then back out the window. “We’re flying. Oh, my!”
“It’s okay. It just took off. They do it all the time.”
“So you have told me. But I need to know something else.”
I put down my pencil. “What?”
“Where is Euphrasia?”
I look past her out the window. The plane climbs higher. It is a clear day, so I can see pretty far, but I don’t even know what direction Euphrasia would be in. “I don’t know.”
“But surely…we can see so far away.”
“I don’t know.”
But then I do see it, a little wilderness near the shore, almost out of sight. I know it’s Euphrasia because, through the trees, only visible if you know it’s there, is a spire. The castle.
“I think that’s it.”
“That?” She stares where I’m pointing. “So small?”
“Yeah. Everything looks small from an airplane. You can’t even see people from here. It’s not a big deal.”
“But that is impossible! It cannot be so small! It was my whole world.”
And then she leans her forehead against the window and doesn’t say anything for a very long time, just stares at that tiny spire until we’re high in the clouds.
Chapter 8:
Talia
I wake due to Jack’s repeated nudging.
“We’re here,” he says.
“In America? Your country?”
“In Miami.”
I cannot speak. Does he mean to say that we have completed our entire journey? It seems barely longer than the time spent walking to the Euphrasian border. I wonder…if everything can be accomplished in so little time, does that mean people live longer?
“How long was I asleep, then? Three months? Six?”
Jack laughs. “The flight was long, but not that long—a few hours.” He hands me a crinkly object, which I now know is a plastic bag. “Here. I got you some pretzels.”
I have no idea what a pretzel is, but I take the bag. “Thank you. It is lovely.” I gaze at it. It is blue and says AMERICAN AIRLINES. “I shall treasure it forever.”
He shrugs. “I thought maybe you’d eat it.”
So I do. It takes a few attempts to open the bag, but once I do, the pretzels are crunchy and salty. I wonder if all American food is like this. If so, it is a bit dry. Still, I eat them politely. “Lovely.”
Jack points to the window. “There it is.”
I look. There are strange sorts of trees, tall with no leaves save for little hats on top, and there is water all around. I remember that we have been flying in the air all this time, ten hours, and it should be nighttime, yet it is daylight, glorious, sunny daylight, and I am free to go out into it if I please.
And suddenly, the pretzels taste not like salt but like freedom.
“I need my hairbrush,” I tell Jack.
“What for?” He opens his travel trunk.
“We shall be meeting your family, shall we not?” When Father returns from a voyage, Mother and I and all the members of court meet his ship with flowers. If this is to be like that, I should comb my hair. In any case, a princess must keep up appearances.
I take out the simplest hairbrush I own, silver with hardly any jewels. Jack was appalled when he saw it. Modern hairbrushes, he says, are made of plastic. I know what plastic is now, and I must say that it has none of the appeal of silver. I threw out the plastic shoes Jack purchased for me, which pinched my feet so that I could barely walk. Now, I have cloth shoes which tie in front. Still, I yearn for my own shoes, made of the finest kid and fitted exactly to my feet.
I miss my lady’s maid, who brushed my hair one hundred strokes each morning and night. I miss being a princess.
But then I remember Father’s anger. That I do not miss at all.
“Nah, no one will be there,” Jack says, recalling me to the time and place.
“Beg your pardon?”
“My family. They’re all busy. You’ll meet them later on, I guess.”
“But surely someone—”
“Nope. We’ll take a cab.”
I took a cab to the airport in France, and the most I can say for it is that it is not a bus. I shake my head but keep a c
ivil tongue inside it. It seems incredible that a young man could journey across the ocean and come home to no fanfare whatsoever. I examine Jack’s face. His lips are pursed, his brow furrowed, and I suspect that his thoughts on the subject are similar to my own. It strikes me that Jack and I suffer from the opposite problem: While my parents kept me too close at hand, Jack’s do not keep him at hand at all.
Suddenly there is a giant bump that causes my seat, my body, my very bones to jump, and there is a sound like a thunderclap.
“What was that?” I cry.
Jack laughs. “Relax, silly. We just landed. We’re on the ground.” He takes out his telephone and turns it on.
“We are?” I glance out the window. It is true. We are. The trees and ocean are no longer visible, replaced by dull, gray land. But a moment ago, I was in the clouds! Me. Talia. After three hundred sixteen years isolated in a castle, apart from everyone, in three days I have met a boy, run away, and crossed the ocean in a magical flying machine. Who would have believed it possible?
Certainly not my father.
Chapter 9:
Jack
It takes a while to get off the plane with Talia’s fifty-pound carry-on. But finally we make it.
I love when you enter the jetport in Miami, and you’re met with that first blast of hot air through the cracks that reminds you you’re home. I watch Talia’s face as we walk off the plane.
“Ooh! So warm!”
I grin.
I told Talia no one would be there to pick us up at the airport, mostly because I didn’t want her to spend an hour in the airport bathroom, fixing her hair with that ten-pound brush of hers and pinching her cheeks to make them pink or something. But I didn’t really think no one was coming.
I check my cell phone to make sure I turned it on, and I check to see if I have messages, even though I know I don’t. I texted both parents when I got off the plane. Nothing yet.
We head downstairs to the baggage claim. Talia seems a bit dazed, and I nudge her. “You okay?”
She rests her hand on my arm. “I am glad you are here. I do not think I have seen as many people in my entire life as I have seen today.”